“Grey Owl” was composed on July 2, 1989, by John Arcand near Grey Owl Estates, Christopher Lake, Saskatchewan. Arcand — born 1942 in Jackson Lake, Saskatchewan — is a Métis fiddler, composer, and educator who learned the Western Canadian traditional repertoire from his father Victor and grandfather Jean-Baptiste and has spent decades gathering Métis fiddle music from across the Canadian plains. He received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in 2003 and the Order of Canada in 2007. The tune’s name refers to the place: Grey Owl Estates and the surrounding Christopher Lake area take their name from Archibald Belaney (1888–1938), the English-born conservationist and wilderness writer who falsely presented himself as Indigenous and lived and worked at Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan — in whose shadow Arcand composed the piece.
The tune was first recorded in 2001 on Arcand’s album Traditionally Yours. The D-major melody has a slight structural eccentricity in the A part — an extra half-measure that gives the phrase an open, unresolved quality before resolution — a feature noted by the Traditional Tune Archive as distinctive to the composition and part of what makes the piece memorable beyond a first hearing.
Darol Anger recorded it for e-and’a (2013). Anger — who played on the original David Grisman Quintet recordings in the late 1970s and has ranged across bluegrass, jazz, and new acoustic music throughout his career — brings the Western Canadian reel into the contemporary progressive string-band context, one of the channels through which Arcand’s compositions have reached pickers outside the Prairie fiddle circuit.
